Search

AGAINST EVERYONE… Is fully funded by patreon. Please contribute to my patreon if you listen the show. Your donation keeps me going, plus you get cool stuff and be part of my mission to bring deep, but easy to listen to, conversations about important ideas to the world. Pledges start at as low as a dollar per month. Contribute today!

We hung out at Michigan Paracon and had a great, in-depth conversation about how to approach the paranormal without fear as the baseline response, the conservatism of paranormal investigators and convention goers, giving haunted boxes CAT scans, how all medicine is haunted, difference and repetition, why curiosity matters,

When I edited the episodes, I realized that I talk a whooole lot in this episode because the Newkirks’ research and work is so inspiring and exciting to me. But if you want lots more Newkirk, it’s easy to find: Go to their patreon and support it and you get tons of content!

* NOTE: The Newkirks warned me that Billy can cause some audio/visual issues. My ep was no exception! There was a sort of tumbling hiss and crackle throughout the ep that I had to have removed (but there’s still some left), and then I had to have another sound issue dealt with, and the video quality wasn’t as good as my other eps even though I used the exact same equipment and procedures.

AGAINST EVERYONE is fully funded by Patreon. Please support the show and contribute to my mission to bring deep but accessible conversations to the world, and you’ll also get great stuff. Signing up is easy, and contributions start at as little as a dollar per month.

One of my favorite musicians, Ben Chasny (AKA Six Organs of Admittance) joins me on AEWCH to discuss the occult properties and relationships of tones, chords, and intervals. We don’t just discuss them, Ben plays them, and we see what happens; in particular we use Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on music (starting at 32:00) and the evolution of consciousness to lead us. Also, on the four occult bodies, feeling the music versus allowing music to grow out of itself, why we need to listen to and through the entire body, Billy Idol and Francoise Hardy, Deleuze and repetition in songs, Ben’s Hexadic system for composing, and why music makes us feel the way it makes us feel.

There are four (yes, four!) musical performances on this episode. Here are the songs and when they happen:

This is one of my very favorite conversations – I can’t believe I had the opportunity to speak with MacArthur fellow Kelly Link and brilliant new novelist Jordy Rosenberg! We had the conversation just a few days before Link’s MacArthur Award was announced, and just a few days after Jordy’s book was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Award!

How fantastic elements in fiction can fall into reinforcing political power; how capitalism works like magic; how we turn social forces into entities; when characters becomes concepts and vice versa; autotheory; scent, senses, and pleasure in fiction; Mandy and zombies; murder; disassociation as a strategy; the evolution of consciousness through novels; and a whooooole lot of literature.

ALL PODCAST FORMATS

Joan of Arc, Cap’n Jazz, Owls, and Make Believe frontman Tim Kinsella has long been a source of creative inspiration for me. So it was such an honor to have him on the show, and a pleasure to talk with him. The conversation is wide-ranging, but also intense.

We talk about music, of course; but also the occult, how art happens to us and why, the merits of making audiences uncomfortable, why utopia motivates us, modernism and ghosts.

In this episode, we talk about psychology and phenomenology of time, how love has become more authentic and changed the experience of time, the vulgarity and beauty of Joyce and Ulysses, what Christianity has made available and closed off when it comes to intimacy, the struggles of the Victorian era, just how real the concepts of “modernist” and “romantic” and “Victorian” periods are, how pain and time are interconnected, why a reevaluation of time and space needs to be part of labor activism, and more!

I was alarmed to find that there weren’t many podcasts or interviews with Stephen available online (although he is known and respected in literary and historian and other academic communities) so I was determined to bring his work to a broader audience.

For show notes (this time there are LOTS of links to books!), click here.

Keeping with my promise to do some sex & sexuality-themed episodes, this time I’m talking about privacy and secrecy, how “invasion of privacy” is another name for “extraction of labor,” why we need to smash out cognitive dissonance around those concepts, how old notions of privacy have been seized by corporations, why we think of corporations as people, social media, and what happens if we smash the old version of privacy and move into a notion of being more public.

Show notes are now available for everyone, and you can find them here.

AGAINST EVERYONE… is fully funded by listener/viewer support. Please docontribute via Patreonso I can keep making great episodes. Thank you.

Friends,

On the 40th (!!!) episode of Against Everyone with Conner Habib, I met with poet Zachary Schomburg in an old bakery* in Portland to talk all about poetry.

Zach’s poetry is profound, frightening, eerie, and absurd. His book Scary, No Scary, which he reads a bit from on this episode, is a masterpiece, and a great bridge into poetry if you’ve never really gotten into it.

In this episode, we talk about:

Not-knowing and writing; the identity of a writer; what style is; ghosts, deer, and hummingbirds; the way certain words arouse us and why; how poetry is like a computer trying to come to life; poetry and Lacanian psychoanalysis; the index as your analyst; how writing is violence; light and death; how the poem on the page is not the poem; recreating reality, and more.